Friday, May 09, 2014

Obama’s Foreign Policy: One Big Coverup

Obama will eventually adopt the Russian line on Ukraine if for no other reason than to avoid exposing his own impotence. It’s why Obama has adopted the Iranian position on its nuclear weapons program, accepted Russia’s Syrian WMD deal and why Kerry and his cronies are busy blaming Israel for the collapse of peace negotiations that were actually sabotaged by the PLO leader.

If you can’t beat them, join them. And Obama can’t beat them. Joining them is his only option.
The culture wars and media firing squads, the SEIU members who shepherd the elderly and infirm to voting booths, the illegal aliens who vote three times because voter ID is racist, are excellent tools for defeating Republicans; but they don’t impress Vladimir Putin or the Islamic militias of Benghazi.

Whatever else went down there, Benghazi had to be covered up because it was easier to join the Muslim mobs burning American flags by throwing a Coptic Christian into jail and filming an apology.
It was easier than sending in the Marines or even the drones. It was easier to do nothing, prep for a debate with the real enemy, Mitt Romney, before flying off to party in Vegas.

Obama has preemptively surrendered to anyone and everyone. Even countries he opposes on an ideological basis have discovered that if they slap him around long enough, he will come around.
It just takes a little longer.

Egypt held the line, despite the threats from the State Department and the White House, until Obama decided that it was easier to give in to General Al-Sisi. The condemnations still come, but the Apaches are also on their way.

Despite Obama’s commitment to the Muslim Brotherhood, he blinked.

Obama declared a red line on Syria. Assad is still in power and the red line is crumpled up in an Oval Office desk along with a dozen candy bar wrappers and a dented Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s easier for Obama to surrender and pretend that was his policy all along than to put up a fight.
It’s easier for him to side with Israel’s enemies than with the Jewish State. It was easier for him to appease Putin before the invasion of Ukraine, now it’s easier for him to throw out a few hashtags and stay well away from the fighting and then at an opportune moment, pressure Ukraine into accepting whatever deal the Russians put forward.

Putin knows it and that’s why his people are humiliating Hagel and Kerry to up the ante for the final concessions. Ukraine, like Israel, like so many other allies, will be forced to pay a high price to cover up the ego and incompetence of Barack Obama.

Obama’s foreign policy is one big cover up. From Europe to Asia to the Middle East, allies are sacrificed, positions are abandoned and credibility is set on fire to convince Americans that their leader knows what he’s doing. To avoid ever losing a fight and being seen as a loser, he preemptively surrenders.

The media’s story is that Obama meant to do these things. He meant to reverse himself on military aid to Egypt. He meant to set a worthless red line on Syria. He meant to protect Ukraine with hashtags. He meant to do nothing about Benghazi.

Some presidents cultivated a policy of strategic ambiguity to keep the country’s enemies off balance. Obama does it to keep Americans off balance about what he really did and what he really meant.

Obama makes sure to take at least two positions on every foreign policy issue. He evolves and then devolves and evolves again. He was for calling Benghazi a terrorist attack after he was against it. He was against dealing with Assad, before he was for it. He was against containing Iran before he was for it, before he jettisoned containment and skipped straight to embracing a nuclear Iran.

He issues statements that sound bold and decisive, but with just enough wriggle room to allow for a sellout. There’s enough equivocation to cover the ass of the naked emperor no matter what happens. Even while his people were pushing the lie that the Benghazi attack happened because of a YouTube protest, not terrorism, a general aside about “Acts of Terror” was inserted into the Rose Garden speech to cover him against the day when the truth could no longer be denied.

Obama’s speeches are full of double meanings and ambiguities. He came out in favor of a united Jerusalem, only to then explain that he didn’t mean it would be united by Israel. His “Red Line” comments on Syria were so ridiculously ambiguous with the outcome being, “That would change my calculus,” that they meant absolutely nothing at all.

It was the media that took the comments seriously and ended up with egg on its fedora.

Benghazi wasn’t an aberration. It was typical of his foreign policy. It was the policy of Hillary Clinton who liked to talk tough, saying of Gaddafi, “We came, we saw, he died”, while her spokesman called Assad a “dead man walking”, but when push came to shove, she abandoned her people to die without asking for military aid.

She polished her resume, they went, they died.

Democrats complain when Republicans talk about Benghazi. But why don’t we talk about Obama’s foreign policy? Why don’t we talk about the botched war in Afghanistan, his failure to stand up for the Green Movement in Iran, his push for the Islamist Arab Spring, his fumbling in Syria and his poor relations with traditional US allies in the Middle East?

Why can’t we talk about his many lies about Al Qaeda, beginning with selling the disastrous Afghan surge as a platform for defeating Al Qaeda in a place that it had mostly abandoned, only to then declare victory over an Al Qaeda that had hardly been there?

Did Obama sacrifice 1,600 Americans in Afghanistan in a phony campaign for an election talking point?

Is there any part of Obama’s universally disastrous foreign policy that we can talk about? Or is it all one big cover up?

Obama’s problem isn’t just that he sympathizes with terrorists and has a distaste for national power and the military, but that everything he does falls apart.

There is no national conversation about foreign policy or even domestic policy the way that there was during the days of Bush and Clinton. Instead we talk about Obama. Media coverage focuses on his celebrity, his political enemies and his plans for the future in purely personal terms.

The past is a foreign country. And the media doesn’t travel there. The results of his policies at home and abroad are a mystery. The media won’t tell us what happened two years ago or three years ago, so it pivots to the latest racial outrage or hashtag.

Benghazi is one of the many disasters left in his wake and his defenders insist that it go unexamined and the process of covering it up, which began while the bodies were still warm, go unnoticed.

The Obama illusion falls apart if you look at it from any angle other than the front. If you look behind it, there are flames, burning buildings, screams and political hacks who call each other “dude” making up lies about why it happened before moving on to pushing a news story about his wife’s latest hairstyle, their latest vacation or the latest celebrity they were photographed with.

Benghazi is an important part of the conversation that we need to have. But it doesn’t end there.